County Councils & Combined Authorities
Webinars and resources on themes relevant to communications teams serving our regions.
The roll-out of regional devolution – through mayoral and other strategic authorities in England – is set to redistribute political, social and economic power. The issue that underpins it all is how to ensure the population has the skills needed to get and keep meaningful work that drives growth for all.
Skills England
This Government agency been established to drive growth across the country, supporting people to get better jobs and improve their standard of living.
It will identify skills gaps and develop ways to address them. It will work with combined authorities and businesses and training providers in their regions to shape learning – including through the Growth and Skills Levy, a more flexible successor to the Apprenticeship Levy.
Priority areas for skills training and job recruitment are health and social care , construction, education, manufacturing, and science and technology.
Supported Employment – Connect to Work
Council teams will also have a big part to play in securing Supported Employment for local people not participating in the labour market due to health issues or disability or complex barriers to finding and keeping a job.
Grants will be issued to 43 Accountable Bodies in England (there is a separate scheme for Wales) through the Connect to Work programme to provide pathways to skills training and other relevant support.
Greater Manchester and West Midlands combined authorities have alternative funding for supported employment places.
Accountable Bodies will need to identify and recruit eligible applicants for the programme which will support around 100,000 people across England into meaningful and sustainable work.
Get your campaign tactics right from the start
Getting the right outcomes for local people so they can realise their potential at work means bringing your comms A-game to your campaigns.
Communications teams will need to reach eligible groups in their region and encourage them to register interest in skills training.
They will also need to gain support for this from professionals like health and social workers and from employers to supply suitable opportunities.
CAN is one step ahead of the curve.
For the past few years we’ve developed tactics for recruiting to adult learning courses, skills training and supported employment, including:
- Developing sophisticated Google Search profiles/keyword lists for specific groups.
- Delivering cost-effective online programmatic (real-time bid) advertising based on audience interests and demographics.
- Designing bespoke campaign landing pages featuring easy-to-read information and simple initial enquiry forms that don’t put people off.
- Supplying free ad tech that can remarket messages to people who don’t sign up first time.
- Optimising channels and creatives, leading to a low cost per registration and full courses.
Webinar catch-up: Connect to Work, Work Wise and Upskilling Your Region
Our latest webinars on employability, skills and jobs
Supported Employment – Making the Most of Connect to Work
The Connect to Work scheme is a cornerstone of the Government’s commitment to supporting people who would like to work but don’t – due to long-term health issues, disability or complex barriers to finding and keeping a job.
In this webinar, we run through some of the campaign tactics that have been a proven success in getting eligible groups of people to sign up for career pathways, training, skills and employability opportunities.
The speakers provided great examples of regional campaigns that are currently having a positive impact getting people from left-behind communities into work – making the best of funding opportunities like Connect to Work.
From Nicholas Werran, Partnerships Director for Breaking Barriers Innovations which is improving pathways into employment through the More and Different programme, we discovered:
- The importance of using research on barriers to local employment to ensure people are work-ready.
- How place-based housing, health, and local government organisations, colleges and employers – need to work together beyond recruitment so people can keep jobs long-term.
- Six critical intervention points for best practice in recruitment and five key outcomes a successful programme should achieve.
From John-Paul Danon, Collaboration Director at CAN, we heard why:
- Publishing job vacancies and training places on organic channels like email and social media – leads to more inequality of opportunity. Most people in left-behind communities won’t see them.
- Taking people straight from advert to full application will put off most of the cohort. Collecting an expression of interest that includes an option to ask for support works.
- You should use creatives featuring local people in recognisable locations, simple language and specific strategies to capture 16-17-year-olds and unpaid carers.
Download PDFs of the presentations:
Designing an Effective Campaign to Open up Jobs to More People
Making employment opportunities accessible for a wider range of people brings numerous benefits – to wellbeing, to local and regional economies, and to council finances as people become less reliant on social services.
In this webinar, we focus on a scheme that has had great outcomes for one English county, supporting people with health conditions, disabilities and neurodivergence into employment.
Catherine Jevans, Senior Communications Manager for Surrey County Council, told us why and how the Work Wise scheme was implemented in the county. She described how the marketing campaign was planned to target three main groups:
End users – people who struggle to secure long-term work, their family and carers.
Referrers – from social services and other professions.
Employers – local businesses offering job opportunities.
Matt Kilpatrick, Head of Campaigns for CAN, talked about the paid media campaign for Surrey Work Wise focusing on three main ingredients that made it a success, with 226 referrals and 22 job placements within the first 6 months:
Inclusive – reaching as many of the target audiences as possible online where they look every day and supplementing with physical channels in a highly focused way.
Always saving – being mindful that each £1 spent on paid media should mean £1s saved on service costs. Ruling out channels that are expensive per outcome and using owned media like email.
Nothing without data – making sure the insight is there before you start – things like social listening and Google reports on what people are putting into search engines locally – and that outcomes are measurable against spend.
Nicholas Werran, Partnerships Director for Breaking Barriers Innovations (BBI), provided perspective on how campaigns like Surrey Work Wise fit into current projects to get more people into employment across the UK through place-based approaches like its “More and Different”. This improves pathways into employment in the health and care sector.
Download PDFs of the presentations:
Employability and Training: How to Upskill Your Region
In this webinar, we concentrate on the delivery tactics and channels that have been proven to increase course applications for employability, recruitment and training campaigns – with a focus on paid programmatic platforms.
Programmatic is a form of digital advertising that uses automated technology. The automation informs:
When an ad is seen.
Who sees the ad.
Where the ad is seen to best achieve the campaign objectives.
Its advantages are: reach – 92% of UK over 18s (Source: ONS); targeting – geolocations, demographics, interests, behaviours, values, segments and languages; limited wastage – only those meeting audience criteria will see the adverts; metrics – a huge range of data to measure results; and optimisation – changes can be made to the campaign live.
We drew from best practice across adult learning, apprenticeship and employability scheme recruitment campaigns to suggest a winning way to reach potential applicants and fill courses.
Its basis is the Government’s focus on empowering regional authorities to support their populations into better and longer-term work.
With Skills England established to identify skills gaps and develop ways to address them in collaboration with local government and businesses and training providers in their regions.
In the webinar, our main speaker, CAN’s Customer Success Manager Allan Watson, explained:
- Online delivery strategies, including contextual paid media and search.
- Using segmentation to reach different demographics and social groups.
- Optimisation to lower cost per outcome.
- How to improve user experience.
- Nurturing people into taking the next step via retargeting.
And talked through examples of where these tactics have already been used successfully by adult learning providers.
Download a PDF of the presentation:
Adult skills and employability campaigns - some of our latest successes
Webinar catch-up: Evolving Public Health Communications
In this webinar we discuss what’s working and not for public health communications campaigns.
NHS behaviour change comms consultant Russell Cartwright draws on his 25 years’ experience in this space to offer insights into:
- Using behavioural science in public health communications.
- How to factor in environmental barriers such as service capacity.
- Using benchmarking with other organisations to find out who does campaigns well and what you can take from their tactics.
Russell also talks through learnings from an innovative current campaign in which six councils in South-East London have pooled resources with the aim of increasing take-up of smoking cessation services.
He describes how measuring the campaign live meant it could be
continually refined and optimised for improved results..
John-Paul Danon, Collaboration Director for CAN, discussed how to use “always-on” search and remarketing in public health campaigns – and an “invest to save” mindset – for better health outcomes and service savings. This approach builds continual insight into what is working, improving results over time.
John-Paul answers questions such as:
- How and where is media consumed by the audiences you want to reach?
- When is the right time to intervene to change behaviours and what are the best channels to use?
- What can you do to reduce budget waste and how employing search and remarketing using the anonymous data trails left by people online can make all the difference.
Webinar catch-up: When Three Campaigns Come Along at Once! Public Transport Consultations
There is a new national emphasis on unified and integrated transport systems. These provide a vital infrastructure on which regional economies can grow, supporting people to find and keep work long-term.
Alongside the continuing emphasis on embedding greater use of active travel methods, local authorities are being tasked with more engagement and consultation around public transport with residents and businesses.
This webinar looked at how comms pros ensure they get meaningful feedback from a range of voices in an area of public life that has become – perhaps unexpectedly – contentious.
Here is a recap of what we covered in the webinar.
Two speakers from combined authorities – one in the north of England and one in the south – brought their insights after recently running public consultations into the possibility of franchising their respective bus services.
Danielle Sorsby, Head of Communications at South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, knew from previous consultations in the county that a large proportion of the population were unhappy with bus services.
The authority needed to dig into what was important to people and drive policy change and funding as a combined authority to improve the situation.
Her tips included:
- Easy-to-understand content and an accessible and inclusive consultation process.
- Monitoring feedback while the consultation is live to make tweaks like refreshed creatives and prioritising spend on different channels based on responses. This was especially useful to uncover under-represented groups – which included young people. When extra engagement was put in place their response rate went up from 5% to 13%.
- If in doubt – stick a dog on your marketing!
Ed Colman, Head of Communications, Engagement and Public Affairs at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, emphasised the importance of bus travel to the remit of a combined authority.
There’s a mix of urban and rural communities who are often served very differently by public transport which leads to inequalities of opportunity.
His tips included:
- Framing questions to get informed responses that cover the range of issues involved in this sort of decision rather than pitching it as a binary referendum.
- Ensuring the range of responses is representative of your population by purposefully targeting people with one or more barriers to participation. And not just targeting current bus users but those could switch to public transport if it served them better.
- Using the insight gained to keep engaging with groups from the end of the consultation to the adoption of franchising if chosen. This could take 2-3 years, so there is a need to keep people on the “journey”.
After the consultations, a bus franchise option was announced for both combined authorities.
John-Paul Danon, Collaboration Director at CAN talked specifically about best practice around the delivery of consultation campaigns.
He provided ways to tackle the challenges of presenting complex information, poor user experience on landing pages, low inclination to respond and the fragmented media consumption of the audience. These included:
- Simplifying consultation material using video explainers on landing pages and prioritising questions so everyone isn’t hit with all of them all at once. And building mini consultations in-platform so people can stay within their social media channels and still respond.
- Engaging with non-digital households by mapping geolocations and using direct mail for these areas only.
- Understanding from data what is driving interaction, how much it costs per response and whether some channels are just not worth your while.
- If in doubt – stick a frog on your marketing!
Webinar catch-up: Children's Campaign Heroes – Improving Lives & Delivering Outcomes
What can we learn about communications planning and delivery from children’s services campaigns that have successfully delivered real-world, measurable outcomes?
In this free webinar, we focus on one county council’s award-winning campaign that helped significantly increase attendance rates in its primary schools. And we also look at the online strategies helping local authority fostering services to recruit more foster carers.
The impact of both on children’s life chances is vital. But this is communications work that also has the potential to contribute to huge savings on service costs now and on interventions for the future.
In this webinar Danielle Taylor presented a deep dive into Staffordshire County Council’s campaign “Little Heroes”, which scooped both Best Creative Comms and Best Behaviour Comms categories at the prestigious comms2point0 UnAwards last year.
This campaign turned around a post-Covid drop in school attendance of 2.4% for Key Stage 2 and 3 pupils across Staffordshire primary schools (almost 60,000 children in all) into a 2.9% increase in attendance.
This translates into thousands of school days regained and means fewer children left behind in learning and socialising.
Its clever borrowing of the superhero model so loved by children and using HERO as an acronym “Here Every Day, Ready On-Time” helped them unlock their superhero potential, while tackling the everyday “villains” of mild illness and anxiety.
Instead of disciplining children and parents, the campaign used positive reinforcement and practical tools to manage anxiety, helping to reduce barriers to attendance.
In this webinar John-Paul Danon, Collaboration Director for CAN, explores new thinking around recruiting foster carers that has been developed by CAN and its now 45 council and council-owned clients.
This is based on investing marketing budget into the measurable, lower-cost-higher-performing online channels and tactics that have worked so well for many years for Independent Fostering Agencies (IFAs) – rather than channels that have little impact on real outcomes and are costly. JP also has advice to overcome internal blockers.
More about the County Council and Combined Authority Webinar Series
These are free online sessions for communicators who want to get the best outcomes from their campaigns.
The subjects and case studies have been chosen with county council and combined authorities in mind – although all public sector communications practitioners are welcome to join the sessions.
The host of the webinar series is Andrew Hadfield Ames, Vice Chair of LGcomms and an experienced communications and campaigns manager who has worked with many county councils.
Email Andrew with ideas for future webinars.
